Translation Guidelines (Template)
This is a template, use it to start your own guidelines document. Also update it with improvements you make in your document.
Capitalisation
Title Case
Title Case if where you make the first letter of each word capital except words like: is, are, a, an.
This is Title Case This is sentence case
If you see something in title case do you change it so sentence case?
Plurals
Gettext Plural Header
What should your gettext plural header be set to?
English style text based plurals
English style plurals are where the text uses both the singular and plural:
Please enter the author(s) name. Document(s)
In some languages if you had to use the same bracketed construct it looks ugly. In Nguni based languages we convert such sentences to only use the plural form, as we feel the singular is inferred and using the bracketed construct in ugly.
Punctuation
French Style
Some sentence appear with spaces before end punctuation:
I am a french style sentence ! Are you sure ?
We call this French style punctuation, should translators keep this style or convert it to a normal style?
Brand Names
Should you translate brandnames?
Do not translate these brands
- OpenOffice.org
- - OpenOffice.org, Writer, Calc, Impress
- + Math, Chart
Where + means yes and - means no. You might want to supply the valid translations for all of these.
Glossaries
List the glossaries that the translator should use.